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There has been a change in the policy on policies, and therefore all the policies have had to be rewritten in order to be in compliance with the new policies policy – A compliance officer at a large investment bank, during a compulsory compliance training seminar this week. November 10th, 2007 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
 As we like to remind you every 5th of November, Guy Fawkes was the only man to ever enter Parliament with honest intentions…  November 5th, 2007 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
October 31st, 2007 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
I hate the use of the word ‘public’ as a synonym for ‘government’. The government is the government and the public is what is not the government. – Leon Louw, at today’s Libertarian Alliance/Libertarian International conference in London October 27th, 2007 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
October 24th, 2007 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
David Attenborough is forever finding unusual creatures in the deepest parts of the ocean. He tells us how they can see down there in the murky depths and how they mate. He tells us where they live, how they raise their young and how they use their tentacles to find prey. But he never tells us the most important thing: what they taste like. – Jeremy Clarkson, the newspaper columnist and lead presenter of Top Gear, the BBC motoring programme. For people who do not know who David Attenborough is, he is the famous maker of very serious but also wonderfully filmed television documentaries about nature. October 21st, 2007 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
“We all have to compromise,” says Walt Chalmers (played by Robert Vaughn) “Bullshit,” replies Frank Bullitt, (Steve McQueen). From Bullitt. October 20th, 2007 | Comments are closed
I don’t care whether Monbiot read Sanskrit or the back of Frosties packets he is still a 24 carat felching tube jammed in the clacker of society. – Commenter Nick M October 18th, 2007 | Comments are closed
Kim du Toit, a regular commenter on these parts with a blog of his own, links to this story about a self-defence shooting in Dallas, Texas. Just scroll down and read the comments from the cop at the end. Absolutely superb. The left-leaning Observer newspaper (UK), meanwhile, carries a hostile piece about gun ownership in the US and the amount of gun crime there. The problem is that the article does not really take into account the rather glaring fact that in Britain, a country with the fiercest gun laws this side of Alpha Centauri, there has been a lot of gun crime in our cities lately. Here is an except:
The problem with all these sort of statistics, I reckon, is that they need to be put into context. Cultures matter: in parts of Europe, such as Switzerland, gun ownership among the adult population is widespread, but gun crime is low, and that fact cannot just be attributed to all that healthy Alpine air. In the US, gun crime is closely linked to drug gangs, and I gently venture to suggest that the War on Drugs, which is a disastrous policy, is the culprit. The statistics given by the Observer – it provides no source – do not tell us whether gun crime is rising or falling, or is stable, or what other categories of crime are like. Nor does it adjust for population levels to compare with other countries where gun ownership might be quite high. It may of course be that some crime, such as acts of domestic violence, would drop if gun ownership was outlawed, but what would happen to things like domestic burglary, for example? I certainly would not want to burgle anyone’s home in Texas for the fairly obvious reason that I would end up very dead. October 17th, 2007 | Comments are closed
Hey you! Yes you there, slouching over your computer, clad only in your pyjamas while you wait for the next remittance from your greedy, unscrupulous, oil-baron paymasters. Who the hell gave you the right to question global warming, you maggot? Don’t you know that it’s SCIENCE??!! Yes, science! What part of the word ‘science’ don’t you understand? Scientists KNOW things. That’s why they are called ‘scientists’. And who are you, pray tell? Why, you are nothing more than a bunch of demented, anti-human global-warming DENIERS. Yes, that’s right, you’re just a rabble of depraved neo-nazis who can only drag your knuckles off the floor for long enough to count your Exxon paycheques. So go back to doing whatever it is you heartless, moronic goons do with your spare time and just leave the scientists to the important business of making the world a better place. Got that? Good. Excellent. Carry on.
Is somebody paying him to say that? October 17th, 2007 | Comments are closed
These – suddenly – are great days for England rugby, but astonishing days, too. In front of a media-packed room yesterday, Brian Ashton, the England head coach, was asked: “What would it feel like to be Sir Brian?” And his genuine look of astonishment said it all. – Owen Slot of the Times reflects on the transformation achieved during the World Cup by the England team (but Bryan Habana may prove too much of a handful for England next Saturday). October 15th, 2007 | Comments are closed
I first wrote this article intending it to be a comment on this thread at the Volokh Conspiracy. It grew so big and wandered ‘through every room in the house’, straying away from the specific topic so I decided not to inflict it on them. Instead, Samizdatistas are the lucky beneficiaries. Seriously, I presume most of you will skip it. That is fine. Here is the amendment as it appears in the US Constitution.
In reading the Federalist Papers it appears obvious, at least to me, that ‘the militia’ and ‘a well regulated militia’ are two entirely different things. Hamilton clearly describes in #29 a great deal of commitment and training required to “acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well-regulated militia” [my underscore] and speculates that for “the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens” it “would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss”. In #46 Madison calculates the number of “a militia” at 1/8 of the entire population.
Clearly Hamilton’s “well-regulated militia” and Madison’s “militia” are entirely different and together with the title of the New York statute that Eugene Volokh cites,”An Act for Settling and Regulating the Militia …”, suggests that the degree of regulation of the militia was a continuous scale. October 14th, 2007 | Comments are closed
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